Serial to USB Cable Won't Work

[Ironside]

I am a radio amateur and I have a piece of amateur radio equipment connected to the computer. There is a RS232 socket on the back, however because the serial socket on the back of my computer is already taken, I have had to get a serial to USB cable. So in other words, the RS232 cable going from the piece of amateur radio equipment goes into this serial to USB extension cable and then plugs into a USB socket on the computer.

Up until a couple of days ago everything was working okay, the software that controls this piece of equipment was using Com port 10. Then all of a sudden, it won't recognise the equipment, I go into device manager and the Com port is not there. When I plug the serial to USB cable into the computer, it says it hasn't installed the software successfully, and nothing will work. I thought it may be a problem may be with the cable, but I have tried two cables and the same thing happens. Any ideas?

 

[MyCattMaxx]

The drivers for the usb-serial adapter may be corrupted.
I had a similar issue with my radio's once a couple of years ago and had to manually reset all of my com ports because it wasn't releasing unused ones and it ran out of ports.
I forgot how I reset that, it's on a piece of paper out in the radio shack somewhere.